From the computer of Peter Clark

With almost every novel I read, I go through the same arc. At first the novel bores me. Then, suddenly, it becomes the most interesting thing in the world. Suddenly, I have made it through the part that was creating my investment in the novel—and now it is all payoff. Now the novel is not just something whose artistry I can appreciate, but something I first order want to keep reading.

I call this point in a novel its volta. The term comes from poetry, where it denotes a shift that sonnets exhibit between their opening octave and concluding sestet or between their first 12 lines and final couplet. At this juncture, the speaker of the poem adopts a new perspective on whatever he has been discussing. (In Italian, one meaning of volta is “turn.”)

We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time.

This podcast killed me. Hilarious.

The thing I find both exciting and shameful about this is that I have got interesting results from so little creative input. The projects I’ve described here are loosely ordered by how much effort I’ve put into them. Not a single project represents more than four hours of my work (plus many more hours of Claude Code churning away by itself).

Just bring back the medieval theme!

By taking away the escape hatch that allows families to apply to schools across the city, the district is abandoning its status quo, forcing it to make every neighborhood school worth attending in hopes of increasing districtwide enrollment and academic outcomes. Su rallied a majority of the board behind that more restrictive approach, even as some parents warned it could push families out of the district before neighborhood schools improve.

Sex House is an American reality television parody web series produced by Onion Digital Studios. Its ten episodes were released on YouTube from July 12 to September 13, 2012. A parody of reality television series such as MTV's The Real World, Sex House follows three men and three women who move into a large house called the "Sex House" together for three months to have sex with each other. They soon realize that they are trapped within the house, which is quickly deteriorating as their health declines, and they have to fight against the show's producers and host to survive. It was lauded by critics, who praised it for its dark satire, its editing, tone, and camerawork being accurate to an actual reality television series, and its cast.